


Did you do something different with your hair?

by FlyingNunLord



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Female Harry Potter, Hogwarts Fifth Year
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-29
Updated: 2019-05-29
Packaged: 2020-03-26 14:22:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19007578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlyingNunLord/pseuds/FlyingNunLord
Summary: “Did you do something different with your hair?”She was going to murder them and she was going to do it slowly.Very, very slowly.





	Did you do something different with your hair?

**Author's Note:**

> So it's the middle of my exams and I'm stressed and looking for an escape. Join me in rare pair hell. Also the spell work is super questionable and I made up some spells don't call me out.

“Did you do something different with your hair?” 

She was going to murder them and she was going to do it slowly.

Very, very slowly. 

As soon as she could get her hair to stop looking like the inside of a kaleidoscope and jittering about the place like an O.W.L student on a three day bender of snorting caffeine instead of sleeping, she was going to murder them.

“I’m going to end you” Harry tried to say, words muffled by undulating neon yellow hair trying to make itself at home in her left nostril.

“It’s for Umbridge, we’ve got to make sure it actually works” George reasoned whilst making placating hand gestures that were wholly counter acted by the immense shit-eating grin stretching his face.

“Yeah and our usual first year taste tester has been in the infirmary for the past week” added Fred, sporting the same look of delight as his brother.

It was a pretty impressive bit of potion brewing; Harry had to give them that. It hadn’t even been 30 seconds since she’d swallowed the chocolate that her scalp had started itching something fierce, pricks of hot and cold running across it in sharp bursts. Seeing something wiggling out of the corner of her eye had brought her attention to the fact that her hair now seemed to have a life of its own, waving about the place and flashing all the colours under the sun and somehow a few more. 

It probably looked incredibly impressive and, on anyone else, she would have found it hilarious. 

But it wasn’t on anyone else. It was on her.

So she very much was not finding it hilarious.

“Antidote or waiting it out” she asked through gritted teeth. It was taking a lot of concentration and quick reflexes to stop her newly sentient hair from making its way into all the orifices on her face.

“Ah, yes, right, well, about that…” George trailed off starting to look the slightest bit sheepish.

“You know multicolour really suits you Harry” Fred jumped in.

“Yeah and the possessed hair look is really in right now, Angelina’s been telling us” George added, as the both of them began to inch further and further away from their latest victim.

“You can’t be serious” Harry said perfectly evenly and not at all hysterically, “I have bloody potions in an hour, Snape’s going to kill me!”

“It’s for Umbridge surely you understand we wanted to make it last as long as possible?!” probably Fred said but Harry could no longer be sure because a chunk of hair had just made off with her glasses and the rest was now wrapped tightly round her head covering her eyes.

“And we already used the antidote potion we made on Fred when he accidentally inhaled the stuff and his nose hair started swearing at us!”  
“It’s going to start swearing at me?!” and okay yes there were the hysterics.

She was either going to potions like this, where Snape was going to skin her alive and make her into a rug for the potion’s room floor, or she   
was going to skive off and be skinned alive later when he found out she’d deliberately missed his lesson.

Wrenching the hair back from around her face, eyes watering at the roughness, before yanking her glasses back, she glared at the two boys who were now both half-way across the common room.

“Oh no, no, no. You are not leaving me to deal with this alone” she snarled out.

Darting forward she managed to grab the edge of George’s sleeve just as the two made a mad dash for the portrait. 

“Fred don’t leave me here!” George yelped, betrayed eyes staring at his brother who already had one foot out of the portrait door. 

“It’s every man for himself mate, don’t worry I’ll prank Umbridge in your memory,” he laughed as he escaped, “I mean the chocolates clearly work” he tossed over his shoulder, wrenching a noise like a stewing teapot out of Harry whilst she clenched her fist tighter around where it had moved to George’s wrist.

“Ow woman that’s my wand hand” George whined as he half-heartedly tried to pick her fingers off his surely bruising wrist.

“Well you better bloody start using that wand hand to fix this or I’m going to break it” she said through gritted teeth.

Her hair felt like it was trying to plait itself down her back but she had a terrible feeling it was just giving birth to the mother of all knots instead.

“Alright, alright! Just, sit over there” George gestured to one of the seats by the fireplace.

It was lunchtime so thankfully no one else was around. It was one of the reasons she’d been up here, just trying to get a little space for herself from the rush of people asking her about Voldemort returning, DA stuff and the memory of that morning’s defence against the dark arts lesson. 

Hopefully she’d only be writing the usual ‘I must not tell lies’ in detention tonight rather than ‘I must not dye my hair the colour of unicorn sick and make it sentient’. She’d run out of space on her body soon enough.

“Honestly why did you eat unattended chocolate in the common room?” George asked sceptically.

Harry sighed heavily.

He did have a very good point. Anything public was free game to the twins and maybe if she hadn’t been feeling so tired when she came into the Gryffindor tower she wouldn’t have made such a rookie mistake.

But sometimes Dean stress-baked with his Hufflepuff herbology partner and left the goodies on the table, though he was always there to keep an eye out for any potential tampering, and when she’d seen the chocolate she’d been sent back to third year where a bit of chocolate from Professor Lupin had always made her feel better.

“I don’t know I missed lunch” 

“I don’t know if the Girl-Who-Lived can tell the time or not but lunch only started five minutes ago” George said giving her a considering look.

“Just please fix it” she said, all previous gusto leaving her words and for once actually grateful of the wobbling hair covering her face from George’s sudden scrutiny.

“Okay” he dragged out the word still staring at her.

When nothing more was said between them, the earlier look on his face began was replaced by one of concentration.

It was very similar to the one Harry sometimes caught glimpses of when on the Quidditch field, right before a bludger went careening at a perfectly calculated angle towards the rival team’s broomsticks, or heads if they happened to be Slytherin.

Of course, whilst on the pitch she didn’t get much of a chance to really look at him when he was taking something seriously. The air of mischief was still there, she didn’t think that would ever go away no matter what the situation, but the cast of his eyes, the downwards pull of his eyebrows, the cute biting of his lip…

Oh. 

Well. 

Maybe it was just as well that she didn’t watch him quite so closely when they were playing Quidditch or catching the snitch possibly wouldn’t be the first thing on her mind.

Before Harry could make a fool out of herself by blatantly staring at George’s mouth any more than she already was, he opened it and started speaking.

“So the colour changing is a pretty easy fix,” he started, raising his wand and muttering a quick Crinus Muto to dye her hair back to the black it usually was. 

“The hair movement on the other hand…” he trailed off, biting his lip again.

It was really starting to get old and by old Harry meant that she could watch him do it forever. 

Shoving that thought to the back of her mind and willing her cheeks to stop turning red she tried to focus back onto the matter at hand. 

Thinking about the mega knot that was forming at the back of her head and how having to untangle it was actually going to be more painful than her scar on a Voldemort-has-decided-to-do-something-very-not-good day, helped.

“Can’t you just Immobulus it or something?” Harry pleaded.

“We could do that if you wanted your hair frozen six ways from Sunday” George raised his eyebrow.

“Oh come on George you were clever enough to make the bloody thing, be clever enough to fix it!” she scowled, the blush returning as quickly as it had left.

“Well the thing is, and it really is very clever thank you,” he smiled cheekily at her, “Instead of simply enchanting all the hair to move as one, we made it so that individual chunks of it could move independently with a mind of its own so that it would get as knotted as possible…” he trailed off peering at the back of her neck where most of the hair had stopped moving because it was now latticed into what looked like a scarf.

“Yes I can feel that” 

“Sorry” he said, actually sounding the tiniest bit sincere.

Harry tilted her head at him.

“We saw what Ginny was like when mum tried to comb her hair after tumbling about in the garden, could hear her screams all the way from the seventh floor” he shuddered, giving her a look of sympathy.

George’s face was just a whole host of new expressions today and they really were not helping to keep her concentration focused on the matter at hand.

There were a few more minutes of silence as they tried to come up with a plausible solution.

“Vanishing it wouldn’t be an option, right?” George said vaguely hopeful though one look at Harry’s face quickly brought his hands up in surrender.

“No, no only joking um…” 

George was actually starting to look a little frazzled now and that was not boding well for Harry’s future life of not being made into a potion’s floor rug.

“Look if you made it actually somewhat sentient couldn’t we just, I don’t know, send it to sleep or something?” Harry asked, frustration again bleeding into her voice as part of her hair tried to steal her glasses for the second time.

“That… could work,” George muttered appraisingly looking vaguely impressed before morphing once again into his default cheeky grin, “It’ll still move about a bit but you can blame it on the awe the air feels when the Great Harry Potter walks through it”

Harry rolled her eyes.

“Ha ha”

“You’ve got to stay perfectly still; I don’t want to accidentally send you to sleep of 5 hours instead of your hair”

“You do that and that prank Lee and I have been planning for the new Inquisitorial squad will find itself a new target” she threatened, though realistically she wouldn’t waste such a masterpiece on petty revenge. Or less important petty revenge than that on Draco Malfoy and his goons.

George laughed, knowing full well it was an empty threat. The hard work her and Lee had put into getting just the right balance of charms and hexes on the fake Inquisitorial Squad badges they’d made was too specific to work on pranking anyone else anyway. If worn, whenever the wearer tried to take points from another house it’d cause them to start waxing poetic about fava beans instead. 

It had taken them hours to find the right charms to keep the pin from exploding with magic and it would be bloody brilliant when they put it into action.

“Yeah, yeah come on I’ve only got half an hour left until potions and I was hoping to get something to eat that wasn’t bewitched chocolate before then”

“Okay just hold still, this is rather advanced magic I’m trying to perform here”

“There’s no try in this situation only do” Harry said, meeting the unimpressed look George levelled at her with a faux-serious one of her own.   
“Right let’s get this done with then” he muttered as he moved closer to her before very gently trying to take one of the tentacles of hair into his hand. His grip was so lax however that it kept slipping out of his hand at each attempt to wrangle it.

“Don’t worry about pulling, the sooner this is over with the better” Harry reassured. After dealing with Aunt Petunia’s near scalp removing braids from the time she was six and Dudley’s childhood hobby of yanking on them, she’d become almost immune to hair pulling. The eye-watering she could do without but the pain she could more than deal with.

George gave a slightly hesitant nod before tugging with a bit more strength, stretching the hair out as best he could away from her head.  
“Dormio totalum” he spoke, a pale blue light shining as he moved his wand in a lazy Z over the hair which then fluttered down to rest on her shoulder once he let it go, snuggling up near her neck.

“Well looks like it’ll work” George said happily and started picking up another chunk of hair.

“Thank Merlin’s balls” Harry sighed in relief, grinning at George’s answering bark of laughter.

Before long he’d made his way through whatever hair hadn’t made it into the Largest Knot of the Century and was stood behind her contemplating on how to go about dealing with it.

“Just yank it honestly, growing up with braids around ‘Darling Dudders’ has gotten me used to a bit of hair pulling” Harry said offhandedly, demonstrating her point by reaching behind and yanking harshly at some of the slowly wiggling hair. 

“Woah, woah, woah, I have absolutely no desire to act like your fat arse of a cousin so we won’t be doing that. Oi stop it Harry” he said as he grabbed hands that were probably doing more harm than good if she was being honest.

“Come on George” she pleaded, squeezing his hands as she tilted her head back to look him in the eyes.

Caught in the warm brown of them she almost didn’t notice the light dusting of pink across his cheeks as he stared back down at her.

She was blaming the holding of her head backwards for the red she could feel growing on her own. 

“Just… Let me try something” he murmured. He removed his wand hand from Harry’s grip and used it to gently push her head forward again, though he kept hold of the other, as if to stop her from trying to attack her hair again despite how she’d long since stopped moving. To be honest even breathing normally was getting to be a little difficult right now.

“Crinus laxo” 

Immediately Harry could feel something happening with her hair, a sort of loosening and relaxing that was quickly spreading all over her scalp.

“Oh” she sighed as a tension that she hadn’t quite realised was there suddenly left and her head tipped further forward.

“It’s something mum came up with after Ginny broke a fifth hairbrush” George said, his voice taking on a softer quality as he let go of her hand to start gently teasing out the loosened hair; sending tiny shivers down Harry’s back.

No one had ever touched Harry’s hair with genuinely good intentions before. The hair style she’d had for the Yule ball had been the work of a nifty charm from Lavender’s immense repertoire of beauty spells, no touching involved. And all the other times her hair had been done by Aunt Petunia had been as clinical and painful as possible.

So this was a very new experience for her. She could almost imagine this would be what it’d have been like to grow up as a young girl with her real mother brushing and styling her hair in the mornings, although the blush on her cheeks and the pounding of her heart probably wouldn’t have been included.

A comfortable quiet had taken over as George worked on finally taming the hair into gently slumbering waves hugging her shoulders, so when he finally finished and spoke in her ear he was done she nearly fell off her seat in surprise, saved only by hands grabbing her.

“Woah there, no need to swoon from my display of high level magic” George teased, though there was a softer edge to him than before as she looked up at his face.

“Yeah well um thanks” she said haltingly as she tried to regain her train of thought from the blissed out state of mind she’d been in earlier.

“Don’t mention it,” he started, “Really, don’t. We want the prank on Umbridge to be a surprise” he winked.

“I think I can manage that, I owe you one for this. Although it was you who caused it in the first place…” she trailed off with a raised eyebrow. Any seriousness was negated by the grin stretching her lips as the easy banter she’d always had with George started to flow again now that he was firmly away from her hair.

“Right, I guess we owe you one in this case”

“A favour from the Weasley twins, I’ll be sure to take full advantage of that” 

“Of course you will” he says leaning back against the edge of one of the settees, crossing his arms over his chest as he rolled his eyes. A smirk was ticking up the corner of his mouth. 

A different silence began to descend around the room when nothing more was said though they still continued to stare at each other. 

“I-” they both started before George gestured with his hand for her to go first.

To be honest, she wasn’t entirely sure what she’d been trying to say but something wanted to make its way out of her mouth and she’d never been one for thinking before speaking, see every interaction with Draco Malfoy ever.

“I…” she began as she glanced up at the clock over the mantelpiece.

“I’m going to be so late!” she gasped, rushing over to where she’d chucked her bag before the whole mess had started. 

She must have been more out of it in the gentle haze of hair touching than she thought.

She was already halfway across the room before the fact that she was about to say… something to George filtered back into her head and she turned to look at him.

“Um, oh god he’s gonna turn me into a rug” she tried to start but she’d caught sight of the clock again and could actually hear the ticking of every second she wasn’t belting it down to potions.

George laughed.

“Go on then or all that hard work’ll have been for nothing” he grins, a warm smile she’d never seen before making its way onto his face.

She really, really didn’t have time to ponder about what that meant though.

“Right uh yes going,” she raced over and yanked the portrait door open, nearly tripping over and braining herself on the floor as she launched herself out.

“Thanks!” she threw over her shoulder, the sound of George’s laughter following her for a ways down the moving staircases and leaving her with a warm feeling right the way up until she arrived at potions two minutes late.

“10 points from Gryffindor for tardiness”

“Bugger”

\----------------

“Why’s your hair moving?”

“The wind?”

“But we’re in the cellars…”

Dropping all the murlap essence into the potion as a distraction was probably not the best idea, especially when working with one Seamus Finnigan.

“That is the fourth exploded cauldron this year Potter, Finnigan. 50 points from Gryffindor”

“Fantastic”


End file.
